No, not in that way[1]. And I hope you now have the Beach Boys tune stuck in your head for the next 24 hours. Ha hah! – my middle name is Spite[2].

What I mean is that, despite being resolutely silent here, I’ve been cropping up elsewhere.

• See me ask Iain M Banks about literary manifestos!
• Observe my curmudgeonly fizzog manifesting on Warren Ellis’ site[2]!

I know, I know – it’s all too much, isn’t it?

Talking about things being a bit all-too-much, it looks like an old friend colleague fellow blogger has resurfaced from the past. At the moment he seems to be retreading a familiar path to the one I met him on; as such, I shall be observing from a safe distance. Twice shy and all that, y’know.

Other me news (because it’s all about me, after all) – my holiday is totally freakin’ booked!

Your “cool [stuff/people/places] to [see/drink/eat/kill/dance with] in Berlin” tips will be much appreciated.

Oh, look – bedtime! Nighty-night, blogosphere.

[ 1 - Pure as driven snow, me. Driven down a London gutter in front of a snowplow, that is.]

[ 2 - Yeah, I know it's not - but once the deed poll paperwork clears... ]

[ 3 - Looks like a certain Shaun C Green made the cut, too, and a few people who I think I recognised but couldn't be sure of. ]

Futurismic is currently in redevelopment, having a new engine fitted … two evenings without posting to it, and I feel a peculiar absence. Blogging definitely has addictive properties.

So, in the interim, I’ll round up a batch of good stuff for sf heads to read on the web and post them here instead.

Kim Stanley Robinson on climate change

The man behind the much lauded Mars Trilogy (which I’ve still never read), Kim Robinson talks about climate change issues at Wired, in the context of his latest novel, Sixty Days and Counting.

Watts, MacLeod, McAuley and Slonczewski on science fiction and the biosciences

Thanks to Peter Watts, we can read [warning - PDF] a group discussion interview from Nature magazine where he, Ken MacLeod, Paul McAuley and Joan Slonczewski talk about their writing, the biological sciences, and the connections between the two.

There is apparently a longer and unexpurgated online version to come, reached by the URL at the end of the piece, but it doesn’t appear to be live yet.

(Special bonus material! Ken MacLeod is not too worried about doctors who think they can be terrorists. It’s the engineers we should be looking out for.)

Lewis Shiner gives it away

A little late to the pixel-stained revolution, but very welcome nonetheless, is Lewis Shiner’s decision to release all of his short fiction online under a Creative Commons licence. Yes, all of it, along with a manifesto about the importance of short fiction for developing one’s writing – and for cultivating readers, too.

I must confess to not having read any Shiner before, but his is a name I’ve had recommended to me countless times. Now I have no excuse, except the old ‘lack of time’ saw. Thanks to the omniprescient BoingBoing for the tip-off.

Happy reading!

Via FutureWire comes material that may provide relief for those concerned that the strictures of the Mundane SF submission requirements leave them too little room for maneuver …

IBM has published a report called “The Next Five in Five”, which is a cheerily optimistic bit of futurist thinking that lays out the five major technological innovations that the Big Blue crew believe will occur within the next five years. You’ll need to click through for details, but here are the all-important bullet points:

1. We will be able to access healthcare remotely, from just about anywhere in the world
2. Real-time speech translation-once a vision only in science fiction-will become the norm
3. There will be a 3-D Internet
4. Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance
5. Our mobile phones will come close to reading our minds

What I find interesting about this report is how plausible it is. It may be that IBM deliberately kept it that way, but even so it contrasts astonishingly to the Tomorrow’s World type of boosterism that I remember from my childhood. I’d watch those programs and think “wow, just imagine that!” I read that list, and I shrug and think “yep, seems likely.”

I have some sympathy with the Mundane manifesto*, and this report shows why – there’s acres of scope for speculative fiction based purely on plausible real-world developments. Though of course you’ll need to get published quickly before reality trumps your fictional masterpiece!

That said, I think there’s still a place for the wide-screen new space opera, which fulfils a different urge. You can write fiction featuring scientifically implausible tropes and still make it deeply relevant to the human condition – as the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks demonstrate most admirably, IMHO.

[* Said Manifesto has vanished into the places where unrenewed domain names are eternally blessed, at least as far as I can tell from a perfunctory Googling, but Abigail Nussbaum's report on it will tell you most of what you need to know.]

Inferno-krusher, clockpunk, The New Comprehensible; new subgenres and literary manifestos seem to be the thing this year. Warren Ellis has unearthed yet another one for us. Heliumpunk is:

“A future or near-future setting where anachronistic and obsolete technology is given a new lease on life, not just because it is cool, but for plausible reasons within the setting.”

Hmmm. It’s too sensible to really catch on, IMHO.